Taken straight from the film’s official website, Above All Else is an intimate portrait of a group of landowners and activists in East Texas who tried to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a $7 billion dollar project slated to carry tar sands oil from Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Risking…
The programming for the 7th annual Canadian Music Week Film Fest has been announced. The festival will run from May 8th to 10th at Toronto’s The Royal Cinema and will showcase a mix of premieres, special screenings, retro rarities and limited engagements. The particular focus this year is to pay homage to musical legends and their long-lasting influence on…
The Iris takes you behind-the-scenes of the SBS 2 Australian series “The Feed” in this exclusive three part series. In part one, we document one of the new season’s most popular segments: The Chin Wag with Lee Lin Chin. Filming every Monday, we take you behind-the-scenes, filming this parody “Celebrity Gossip” segment with Lee Lin…
Following its release in Australia on DVD last month, Nazia caught up with writer/director Andrew Semans to chat about his debut feature film Nancy, Please. They talk about the low budget, the challenges of working with squirrels and more… How did you come up with this deceivingly simple concept and are you happy with it’s execution?…
It was 50 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. Not quite. This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles only visit to Australia and the year that Beatlemania hit. In 1964 the band performed to 73 million viewers on The Ed Sullivan Show, played multiple overseas concerts, met Bob Dylan,…
The 61st Sydney Film Festival has announced 32 films that will screen during this year’s event, with the full program expected on Wednesday May 7th. The festival, which runs from June 4th to 15th, will utilise cinemas all over the city to host its screenings. This includes expanding as far as Blacktown to host a screening of the 40th anniversary…
This week was the final episode of RAKE Season Three and it is well worth seeing if you suspect, as I do, that a fourth season might not happen. It’s not necessarily that the show should end, but that this finale leaves so few questions unanswered that if it did, nobody would feel cheated. That’s…
Winter is coming! Winter is coming! These are words that at least one person you know – if not everyone you know and yourself included – are very excited to hear. That’s because the ridiculously popular Game of Thrones will be premiering its highly anticipated fourth season Sunday night in the USA – which is…
When you learn that the budget for this feature was a measly $10K, you realise what they have pulled off with feature-length film, Thale, released initially in Norway in 2012 and recently broadcast on World Movies (Foxtel). Thale is a Norwegian fantasy/horror film that brings a unique air to the hybrid genre. The film takes…
Just announced to be a part of Sydney Film Festival in June, The Iris brings you this series of exclusive interviews with the stars of the new film Joe. In addition to the interviews below, you can also check out our chat with star Nicholas Cage and director David Gordon Green HERE. Tye Sheridan: Adriene…
With the Marvel Cinematic Universe now officially settling in to Phase 2 of its film franchises there has been a distinct trend of darker more intense storylines coming to the fore. The Avengers really set a huge bar for them to try to match and the expectations are high. With Captain America: The Winter Soldier they…
All that character development wasn’t building up to any big, heartbreaking deaths as many expected. Instead, the Walking Dead crew decided that Season 4’s finale was best used to further the nuanced character arcs and set up a terrifying Season 5. ‘A’ led us through two big sequences, and took it’s time getting through each….
As we near the end of season three of Rake, let’s take a look back and admire the personal accomplishments that Cleaver Greene has made in the past seven weeks. After prison, Cleaver re-entered the world to find that every facet of his life was in disarray: His career was at a standstill, his family was…
If you don’t end up walking out of this movie with a nostalgic tinge for your childhood or singing “Everything Is Awesome” or wanting to buy Lego then you must be a robot. This movie has been one of the hotly anticipated films of the year and with good reason. A combination of stop motion…
Nymphomaniac, stylised as NYMPH()MANIAC (yes, the use of brackets is what you think it signifies), is definitely an ambitious outing for Lars Von Trier, yet coming out of the cinema, I don’t know why I should have been feeling any sense of surprise regarding the film’s content matter or the way in which is was…
Concert movies are a rare breed. It goes without saying that if you’re not a fan of the music of that particular musician or band, then you’re probably not going to have a fun time. Road to Austin, however, is somewhat of an oddity – because even if you’re not familiar with any of the…
Half of a Yellow Sun should be a good film. A critically acclaimed novel, an emotionally charged historical period, an all star pedigree – on paper, you’d be forgiven for approaching the film with high expectations. Sadly, it’s an unfortunately undercooked melodrama that feels decidedly half baked. Set within 1960s Nigeria, headstrong twin sisters Olanna…
We haven’t had an update since it was announced last year that Warner Brothers would be teaming with JK Rowling to make a spin-off film from her astronomically successful Harry Potter series. But now we know more… The film, titled Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, will follow magizoologist Newt Scamander’s search for magical creatures and will be…
Running across four days in Sydney next month, the World Movies Secret Cinema is one of the film season’s most anticipated events. We caught up with Chris Keely, general manager of the event to talk about its origins, how they put each season together and much more: How did the concept for World Movies Secret…
It must be a big relief to the studio heads at Paramount to see Darren Aronofsky’s Noah do so well around the world in its opening weekend. The film has been plagued by behind the scenes struggles and religious controversy. But it seems that Australian audiences were not deterred by any of this, as the film easily…
The 9th Indonesian Film Festival (IFF) will be held in April till May to showcase the best from contemporary Indonesian cinema. The festival is in its 9th season and is a collaboration between Indonesian Student Association of University of Melbourne and University of Technology, Sydney. Dubbed as the “Largest Celebration of Indonesian Screen Culture held in Australia”,…
Just a few years after the animated TMNT (2007), we are getting a live-action reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Based on the comic book series that began in the 80s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looks like it has a pretty good chance of reigniting the popularity of the franchise. With Michael Bay on board as producer, the film…
While at SXSW earlier this month, The Iris’ Larry Heath sat down with the cast and crew of the “slow-burn thriller with rich Texas flavour” (Variety), Two Step. In part one, which you can listen to in full below, we meet Andrew Kenny, who scored the film, Director Alex R. Johnson and Actress Ashley Rae…
There’s been a lot of debate about this film, from many angles and many outlets and many voices. On the one hand it depicts an enormous natural disaster with large scale action sequences the likes of which we see in Hollywood blockbusters as a dime a dozen. On the other, it focuses on a very…
One of the strongly praised films of the 2014 SXSW Film program has been the Terry McMahon-directed Patrick’s Day. Centering around the turbulent relationship between 26 year old schizophrenic Patrick (Moe Dunford), his overprotective mother Maura (Kerry Fox) and the object of Patrick’s love, Karen (Catherine Walker), the film deals with lust, love, manipulation and…
‘Us’ had one job and it was to put at least some of the splintered survivors onto the same trajectory. As such, we were given a mildly touching reunion with Glenn and Maggie, preceded by a showing of just how desperate Glenn can get; desperate enough to wander into a dark cave with an unknown…
With addiction week now at an end, The Iris looks back on five stories that really caught our attention during the week. As is typical with The Feed itself, some stories are serious, others are more fun – but everything is informative in its own way: 5. Porn Free: What life is really like when…
With SBS 2’s The Feed spending their week looking at addiction, we at The Iris and the AU review will be spending a bit of time doing the same. We’re kicking things off here on The Iris by looking at 7 characters whose various addictions make them must-watch television in their own right. You might…
Andy and Lana Wachowski gave us one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time when they unleashed The Matrix upon us back in 1999. The film is still regarded as a classic amongst most circles, but the 2003 sequels failed to repeat the critical success of the original. Their filmography since has only included Speed Racer (2008) and…
Take a former punk rocker out of her comfort zone and place her in the suburbs with her husband and new baby and you’re bound to have some pretty entertaining scenarios eventuate as a result. This is the basis of Jen McGowan’s SXSW-showcased film Kelly & Cal – a story about the relationship between Juliette…
